Meet Faux-Cahontas...

I love this picture of a bearskin-clad Faux-Cahontas—it’s the head Massachusetts senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren superimposed on a photo of a Native American woman with a gun.

It’s one of the many amusing responses to a Boston Herald report on "Roots" Warren’s past as a member of a minority:

A law school directory where Elizabeth Warren touted her Native American roots in the late 1980s and early 1990s once served as a tip sheet for administrators looking to identify and hire minority professors, according to a former chairman of the American Association of Law Schools.

“In the old days before the Internet, you’d pull out the AALS directory and look up people. There are schools that if they were looking for a minority faculty member, would go to that list and might say, ‘I didn’t know Elizabeth Warren was a minority,’ ” said George Mason University Law professor David Bernstein, a former chairman of the American Association of Law Schools.

“Nowadays, if you hear about a candidate who might be available, you just do a Google search and find a resume online,” Bernstein added.

Warren’s embattled campaign has been rocked by questions about whether she used her Native American status to further her career. Under fire from the press, campaign aides scrambled late Monday night and found what they claim is a link to her Cherokee lineage — a great-great-great-grandmother on her mother’s side.

Warren aides clammed up yesterday and refused to answer questions about why she stopped listing herself in the AALS directory after 1995. Around that time, Harvard Law School started boasting that Warren was their first minority female professor.

Howie Carr calls Warren an "undocumented Indian" in a column headlined "White and Wrong: On the Reservation with Elizabeth Warren:"

Funny thing, I think Ted Williams was one-fourth Mexican. He was white. Johnny Bench is one-eighth Indian. I always think of him as white. And then there’s Pochantas Warren, the blue-eyed, one-32nd Cherokee (or so we’re told) who went from the Southwest Conference to the Ivy League over the course of a decade in which she was claiming to be a “minority professor.”

But once she’d parlayed the racial-spoils racket all the way to a tenured position at Harvard Law, she decided to ... pass, as they used to say in the old South. Once she’d reached the pinnacle of her trade, she ditched the fake-Indian routine. Maybe White Eyes Warren saw the smoke signals and figured out that someone was going to call her out on her ancestry. She was right.

Michelle Malkin has a nice column on “Sacaja-Whiner,” as she dubs Ms. Warren:

Elizabeth Warren is the Harvard law professor running for Senate in Massachusetts as a Democratic populist-progressive champion. But don't call her "Elizabeth Warren." Call her "Pinocchio-hontas," "Chief Full-of-Lies," "Running Joke" or "Sacaja-whiner."

Warren has claimed questionable Native American minority status for years to reap career "diversity" benefits. Now, Cherokee leaders, campaign rival GOP Sen. Scott Brown and an army of Twitter detractors have called her out for gaming the racial-preference system. Live by identity politics, die by identity politics.

The Warren saga really does give the lie to identify politics. The people who benefit from quotas and affirmative action are generally people who weren’t disadvantaged in the first place. The people who want reparations for slavery, for example, are people whose lives have not been affected by an institution that was abolished a century and a half ago.

Many beneficiaries of these policies are people like Ms. Warren, who, I feel certain, has never endured the heartache of having the paleface take her land—‘cause, of course, she is a paleface herself. I feel certain that many people who originally supported these programs had good intentions.

But it is inevitable that such programs, even if they were just, would be abused. But I am not letting the serious side of the issue keep me from enjoying this particularly vivid example of what’s wrong with affirmative action. Maybe Professor Warren should have a pow-wow with fellow faux Indian Ward Churchill on how to deal with the public relations side of this debacle.

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Independent Women’s Forum’s mission is to improve the lives of Americans by increasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty. Sister organization of Independent Women’s Voice.